Osama Bin Laden Meets Tina Delgado
The hits just keep on coming...
Been thinking a lot lately about The Real Don Steele, and it's all the fault of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Mr. Abu Ghaith is the vacant-eyed, loudmouthed "religious teacher" who appears now and then via tape on Al Jazeera TV. He's Osama Bin Laden's media beard, blustering with threats against the United States and praising the gang of psychotics involved in the Sept. 11th attacks. On June 23, an audiotape purportedly featuring his voice was aired on Al Jazeera; in it Abu Ghaith claimed that Osama Bin Laden was alive! Alive!
That tape was a clincher for me: I'm now convinced that the barking Abu Ghaith's homiletic inspiration is Boss Radio, the frenetically paced AM rock-radio format that ruled the pop airwaves from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s. More than that, I'm convinced that Abu Ghaith's personal on-air model is none other than The Real Don Steele, the most notorious of the Boss Radio Jocks.
Steele, best known for his Los Angeles years as KHJ's afternoon drive-time voice, pretended to be a screaming on-air lunatic, and peppered his patter with "Boss Angeles!" references. His most famous shtick was the "Fractious Friday" sign-off, delivered against the insistent beat of Phil Upchurch's sax rendition of You Can't Sit Down. It was some 90 seconds of transcendent rhyming nonsense, culminating in the inevitable weekly question, "What do we know and believe???" The answer, week in and week out, year after year, was a tape of a woman's voice yelling deliriously, "Tina Delgado is alive! ALIVE!" Nobody ever found out who Tina Delgado was; even Steele's wife chose not to ask him.
That Abu Ghaith is a Don Steele-wannabe is transparent. Abu Ghaith's announcing needs some polishing, of course; he's currently a tenth-rate Steele, but if he really commits himself, he has the makings of a ninth-rate Steele. What he needs most is an awareness of his peculiar media persona. That is, just as Steele's legendary success was based on knowingly exploiting his on-air outlandishness, Abu Ghaith might make something of himself if only he acknowledged his own on-air absurdity. A better Abu Ghaith, more true to his screaming self, would probably enliven Al Jazeera's format—altogether too "worthy"—as well.
Forget about the barking tapes we've had from Abu Ghaith thus far, and imagine him this way. "Yeah, Baby! It's Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, yo' madman of Faith! I'm the Qadi from the Wadi! The Boss with the Hot Sauce! I got the Verses and I got the Curses! We're gonna put shari'a in Chicago! We'll put houris on the Bowery! But you gotta believe, baby! C'mon now, put your forehead on the radio and testify! What do we know and believe??? Osama Bin Laden is alive! ALIVE!!!"
Something like that. Beats the droning, dead-pan threats that currently constitute Abu Ghaith's "style," anyway. Vocal modulation will be covered in Lesson Two.
By the way, Don Steele died in 1997. He embodied AM-rock's energy and sense of fun, and left an audience of millions smiling. Steele's far more likely to achieve Paradise than is any "religious teacher" who endorses murderous lunatics. And in DJ heaven, Steele's surely got a playlist longer than Boss Radio's repetitive Top 30, or what's a heaven for?
